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Any good caterer knows that garnishes should be fresh. But it would be a reckless understatement to call Sylvan Mishima Brackett “good.” For a casual dinner with friends, the owner of Oakland, California-based Japanese catering company Peko Peko makes a 40-minute detour to a friend’s backyard in Berkeley. In the fading light, he clambers over hillocks of wild watercress, his bee-striped sneakers growing damp as he crouches down to hunt for the tenderest shoots. He snaps off 10 or 12 of them, stem by stem.

Kirk Lombard, a fisherman friend, knocks on the door bearing Dungeness crab fresh from the Bay. In the warm glow of the two bulbs hanging from the raftered ceiling, Brackett hands his visitor a glass of tart-sweet plum wine, brewed from fruit harvested from another friend’s backyard. He pulls the crabs out of the bucket, their claws snapping furiously. His test kitchen has no stove, but the next afternoon, Brackett will fire up one of his three 50,000-plus BTU portable wok burners to steam the seafood.

Brackett’s wife, Jenny Wapner, a cookbook editor, has spoken to him about moderation. But she doesn’t mind that his test kitchen has taken over their yard: Brackett prefers foods cooked over wood fires. At the dinner party the next night, as their friends arrive, he grills exquisite chicken-and-yuzu meatballs on the yakitori grill he’s improvised on the mantle of their outdoor fireplace. When a log explodes, issuing a loud pop, Wapner doesn’t blink but sends Brackett to check the wood-fired Japanese rice cooker. It’s blazing at full strength to steam rice stirred with tangy pickled cherry blossoms—flowers harvested from yet another friend’s backyard.

“There’s this tension,” Brackett admits as he stirs the fire to settle the coals. “Once people call you a chef, you feel compelled to justify it. My food is getting fancier.” He pulls down one of Sato’s matte, iron-hued platters, on which he’ll serve a cloud-like omelet laced with mirin and soy sauce. As he fusses with another garnish of pickled ginger, he laughs. “I need to go back to meat on sticks.”

Emily Kaiser Thelin is a writer and former F&W editor living in Berkeley, California.